Sky Without Stars
by Ailine
Summary: Wash returns to a changed home.


******With a million thanks to Skripka for the beta, and to the FireflySmutOnIce chat that night: Skrip, Flycatcher/Sgib, and Rosheen. Thanks for poking and prodding me through the process.*************  
  
Wash detached the shuttle and slowly floated away from Serenity. He looked down at a tiny moon-sized planet both the shuttle and the ship were orbiting. He was greeted by an unbroken, featureless expanse of gruel- colored cloud cover, a planet so heavily polluted that fifty years earlier the smog and smoke and thick clouds coalesced into the impermeable vista that was the planet's only distinguishing feature.  
  
"Well, welcome home," Wash muttered to himself. "OK, Kaylee, I've got my docking permission and the landing codes so you guys are free to go. Remember, the boat's yours to pilot. And if Mal tries any back-seat piloting, you feel free to give him a whack and tell him to butt out, ok?"  
  
"I can hear you, you know!" Mal shouted as Kaylee laughed.  
  
"Ya know, those dings you put in the hull last time you took to piloting were awfully expensive to repair. I'm just telling you this out of the goodness of my heart."  
  
"Why, Wash, I am shocked and hurt by your lack of faith in my piloting abilities. Why, I remember many a time when my daring piloting saved us from certain disaster ..."  
  
"All right, all right, I give up. I'll see you tomorrow night."  
  
Wash peeled away from the ship and began his descent. He looked up at the stars and watched as they were swallowed up by the overwhelming blankness of the atmosphere.  
  
Standing beside the old, weather-beaten and acid-rain corroded "Welcome to Yucca" sign, Wash looked down Main Street in wonder. It never failed to astonish him how little things changed here. Sometimes it's like I never left, Wash thought to himself. How easy it would have been for him to have just given in to the inertia of the place. It's a miracle I escaped. It's a miracle I ended up being a good pilot and was able to get out of here. How did that happen? How did I get out? How in the hell did my interior monologue end up sounding like Mal's? Now that's scary. Wash shook his head as if to shake loose the thoughts that always carped at him whenever he came home to Yucca. He picked up his bag and resolutely began the long trudge down Main Street towards home.  
  
The overwhelming feature of Wash's life up until the time he escaped was sameness. Here was a planet where stasis was prized and change was viewed with was viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility. The son's life followed along in the path of the father's, both never moving from the worn, deep tracks of polite Yuccan society. Wash thought about his childhood, playing on dusty, grassless fields, and his adolescence, spent as a fourth string receiver for good old Yucca Regional. Every day had been the same: school, which was more like Advanced Cigarette Sneaking, practice, and then the endless hours of drinking and driving, driving and drinking, the ATV's cargo basket filled to the brim with empties. Even then, through the constant stupor caused by too much beer and too many full- contact drills, Wash had known something was wrong with his life, and the life he was expected to lead.  
  
It's not right, he thought, to know exactly how your life was going to turn out, to see in excruciating detail the endless procession of days at the factory, nights at the Lodge, and weekends screaming drunken obscenities at his son as he played bad football on a dusty field. Wash turned the corner onto a street of dark houses. He didn't see the figure standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the street stop and rapidly cross over to his side.  
  
"Well look. It's the all-conquering hero returned to us." This came from a weary, worn-looking woman in her early twenties. Maybe once she had been pretty, but now her face was empty of expression and her body looked as if all the life had been sucked away.  
  
"Carolyn? Oh my God, I, I didn't recognize you. How are you doing? Why haven't you answered my letters?"  
  
"Ma and Dad said you weren't coming until later."  
  
"I'm early. The ship I'm piloting, they had to get going, had to get on to another job; we've been pretty busy lately, which is good, because, you know, employment is good..."  
  
"That's nice," she said vacantly, "Hurry up. Ma is making dinner, and Dad isn't back from the Lodge yet, but he will be soon."  
  
They walked down the street towards the last house on the left. Once it had been a rather cheery yellow color with a riot of flowers that his mother had tended everyday, but the acid rain bleached the yellow and the flowers didn't even bother coming up anymore. Now it was just as grey and dusty as the rest of the planet. Wash and Carolyn walked up the stairs and into the kitchen. Wash still wasn't sure what to think of the changes in Carolyn. When he had left for pilots' school, she had been charming and vivacious and caring. Now she was pale and sickly looking in her faded dress. She had aged so dramatically, she almost looked like...  
  
"You're early. You said you wouldn't be here until seven."  
  
Ma. She looked like Ma. Wash found himself on the back porch staring at the two women illuminated in the yellow light from the kitchen. The fun, sweet, pretty sister he had left behind had aged so much she didn't look much younger than their mother, Alita.  
  
"Ma! How are you! I've missed you so much! You look ... great."  
  
Wash strode over and tried to give her a hug, but Alita grabbed the hot pan off the stove and held it in front of her almost defensively. She walked over to the table and slammed it down.  
  
"Well. Glad to see you back after all these years. You look terrible. That wife of yours, Chloe ..."  
  
"Zoe, Ma. Her name is Zoe."  
  
"It doesn't matter. She's not feeding you right."  
  
"Uh, well, Ma, she's not really the cooking type ..."  
  
But she had already moved on, and she and Carolyn moved around the kitchen getting ready for dinner. Wash watched them in a daze, still shocked at the changes in them. Alita had once been as lively and loving as her daughter, and now the two of them, in their dusty dresses and severe hair looked desiccated, as if all their living were spent, leaving only the husk of the woman behind. He hadn't been gone that long, had he? Wash started counting back on his fingers the last time he'd visited Yucca. He left ten years ago, he came back yearly for a while ... five years? Could that be right? How could they have changed so drastically in five years? How could the place look even more wasted than it had when he was younger? Wash suddenly had a great sense of foreboding. What would his father be like, if these two had changed so greatly?  
  
Wash's memories of his father were just as grey and bland as his memories of everything else on the planet. He, like pretty much everyone else, was a life-long employee of the industrial concern whose emissions were directly responsible for the lack of stars in the skies over Yucca. No one was exactly sure what the factory produced, and since the Blue Sun logo was prominently stamped on every crate that came down to shipping and receiving, no one felt any pressing need to find out. Jerry Warren spent his days in a cramped, windowless office shuffling papers from one pile to another, and his nights climbing up the ladder at the Lodge. He had always assumed his only son would follow in his footsteps. Wash's decision to take the offer at the pilots' school had been one of the greatest unexplained mysteries in his life, and their relationship had never really recovered. Wash did, though, have good memories of his father; mostly of how Jerry would never miss his son play his few minutes of football, no matter how miserable the weather. Other than that, Wash remembered an amiable sort of vagueness. Jerry was a good man, but he had been the exemplar of the Yucca lifestyle Wash felt so happy to have escaped from.  
  
But this man who trudged up the steps and into the kitchen, this man had nothing of that good humanity left in him. Jerry trudged in, grunted in the general vicinity of the women, and sat down at his place at the table. Wash stared pointedly at him for a few moments, until the silence became so great that Alita felt forced to intervene.  
  
"Look, Jerry, its Wash! He's finally come to visit us. But he didn't bring that woman he married."  
  
"Hiya Dad! I'm glad to see you. How was the Lodge? I heard you're going to be a third level horn bearer. Or was it a horn carrier? I always get so confused about all that Lodge stuff. Hey, remember the time that Tobias' dad ..." Wash realized his father wasn't listening. Silence fell over the table, punctuated only by the sounds of Jerry shoveling down the food Alita set in front of him. Wash stared at his father. The sense that things here had somehow shifted while he was away crept over him. Yes, Yucca had always been a bland little rock with a bland populace, but deep down, they had still been vibrant people. The entire planet seemed like it had taken on the same malaise that his family was showing. The life had been sucked away, leaving the shells of the people and the planet behind. Jerry finished his food, grunted again at his family, and trudged back down the stairs without looking back.  
  
"Well, that was awful. How long has he been like that?" Wash asked his mother.  
  
"What do you mean, how long has he been like that? He's the same as always," his mother responded sharply, "Just because you've gone off and become so high and mighty, never coming back to see us simple boring folk doesn't allow you to insult us!"  
  
"Wait, Ma, I ... good God, I can't believe this. I never meant to come across like that. Dad has changed, and not for the better. Everything here has changed, and I used to think that was the best thing that could happen to this shitty little piece of rock but not if it's this kind of change."  
  
"Young man, that sort of backtalk to your parents may fly at the Core, but I will not sit here and listen to you insult us like that."  
  
She disappeared into the house, leaving Wash and Carolyn, surrounded by the detritus of the abysmal family dinner to stare at each other in the yellow light.  
  
"Things have changed here, Carolyn. They've gotten worse. The pollution's gotten worse, Ma and Dad have gotten worse, and you've become a completely different person. What is it?"  
  
Carolyn looked at him and suddenly it was like a dam had burst. Words came tumbling out of her.  
  
"Of course things have gotten worse. How could they have gotten better? This place, it was always a little sad, a little gray. But one day the Alliance comes and they up production at the factory. People are getting sick; babies are dying because of the stuff coming out of that factory. You have no fucking clue what is going on. You think that you were going to come back to the old family home and everything would be just like you left it." She took a deep breath.  
  
"Well I've got news for you Wash: It's time to move on. This here planet? She's dying, and we're all dying with her. And I hate you, because you got out. You are the last, Wash, do you understand? You were the last of us to escape this place before the smog cover got even lower and the last little bit of hope or faith was taken from us. You're lucky, and you don't even know it. I am so jealous, because you found yourself a life, you got married to some random woman we've never met, and you've never looked back, and when you do finally find the time to throw a glance back at us, it's in anger that we've changed. I'm sorry that I'm not that happy sixteen-year- old you left behind. I'm sorry that Ma lost her joy and Dad lost his humanity."  
  
She smiled at him, and he could see through the mask that bitterness and despair had lain over her face, and for a moment he could see that girl looking back at him.  
  
"Please, Wash, don't come back. It hurts me, and it will hurt you. This place will eat at you like it has me, and I want to know that at least one of us got out. If you come back, neither of us will want to face what the other's become."  
  
They stared at each other across the kitchen table. Wash realized she was completely serious, and he knew that it was the right thing to do.  
  
"I'm so sorry, Car."  
  
"I know you are."  
  
Wash got up, kissed her on the forehead and grabbed his bag. "Tell them I had to go. Tell them ... tell them that I love them." He looked around the kitchen one last time and walked back out into the monochromatic night. The weight of the dank, starless sky began to push down on him. He felt like he couldn't breathe. Wash remembered the endless nights of his youth spent staring at that same listless, greasy sky. Every night he would pray to see just one star. The lack of stars had always seemed wrong to him, and it ate at him to know that no one else on Yucca felt that way. Who needed stars, especially with how bad things had gotten? All the stars did was remind you that they were up there and you were down here loading crates or shuffling papers, how pointless your life was. It didn't matter to them that no one had seen a star from the ground in fifty years, or a clear night sky in over a hundred. The stars were everything good and pure and hopeful about the `verse, and those sentiments didn't exist anymore.  
  
He had desperately wanted to see them long after everyone else had given up. That's what had driven him off the planet. That's why he had been saved from Carolyn's fate. The stars had saved him. Carolyn had seen both his past and his possible futures, and she had given him permission to seek the better one. This was it, this was the end, because if he kept coming back that starlight in his eyes would fade away, suffocated by the beige clouds and the dusty ground. Carolyn had set him free.  
  
Wash realized he could no longer take it. He broke into a run, heading for the empty docks and the shuttle. Serenity would be back the next evening, and the shuttle had more than enough life support and amenities to keep him happy until then. "That's what I'll do. I'll just go and sit. Take a look around. It'll be peaceful. I can even think of some more ways to annoy Jayne!" he thought to himself as he ran flat out across the dusty streets of Yucca.  
  
The shuttle made its way through the beige cloud cover, finally breaking into the black. The stars shone as they always had; they were always there, even if you couldn't see them. Was settled back into his seat, took a deep breath, and drank them in. 


End file.
